a free, open-source tool for Windows and UNIX for getting news from RSS feeds in email

Just a little FYI if you encounter this: MacRumors user durlecs was having a problem scheduling rss2email with launchd, Mac OS’s built in replacement for cron and other UNIX services. It looks like he/she got it working in the end by adding the path to Python into the PATH environment variable.

Good news everyone! Two important tools that rss2email depends on have recently received major upgrades: feedparser and html2text. These should improve rss2email’s ability to handle feeds with poorly formed HTML and other weirdness.

The rss2email application itself also needed to be upgraded some to support these. Changes in this version:

Last week I made a slight change to the v2.69 rss2email packages, which can cause suspicion that they have been tampered with. To mitigate this, I put the original v2.69 files back in place and renamed the updated package set to v2.69a.

The v2.69 rss2email packages contain an example config.py file that might accidentally overwrite an existing config.py file. To keep this from happening I’ve updated both the Linux and Windows by simply renaming the file to config.py.example.

Unlike the last few versions of rss2email that have trickled out, I finally got around to adding a few new oft-requested features! Version 2.68 of rss2email is now available for both Linux and Windows.

Changes from the previous version:

Added ability to pause/resume checking of individual feeds through pause and unpause commands

Through r2e pause n where n is a feed number, you can temporarily suspend checking that feed for new content. To start checking it again, simply run r2e unpause n. When you r2e list, an asterisk indicates that the feed is currently unpaused and active.

OMPL Import/Export

OPML is an XML format commonly used to exchange a list of RSS feeds between applications. r2e opmlexport > filename will give you a file that you can use to import your list of feeds into another application. If you’ve exported feeds from another application into a file, r2e opmlimport filename will add those feeds to your rss2email feed list.